There’s a special place in hell for “reporters” who try to gaslight people for clicks. Take a little FM radio station (101 the Eagle) in Illinois that tries for social media clicks by headlining a story, “Wait, Illinois Crime is Now Suddenly at a Record Low?” The fact it was “written” by “Doc Holliday” should have been a dead giveaway. And the question mark at the end? Why, it’s almost like he didn’t believe it.
My momma always told me if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is.
Folks, crime in Illinois – particularly Chicago but pretty much all of Illinois is far, far from a record low. If you believe that you’re about as smart as a Florida man who doubled down on his stupid pills.
Ol’ Doc (who in his bio says he’s related to the TB-infected lawman from the 1800s, but has never shot a gun) cited a Capitol Fax story for his incredible initial revelation.
Oh, but wait, Doc did his own research:
I saw this conversation on the Illinois sub-Reddit page mentioning words I’m not used to seeing together – Crime in Illinois at record low. As with everything I see shared on Reddit, I needed to do more research to verify if it’s really true.
The article the poster linked to was an article by Capital Fax. Not willing to accept that as fact either, I followed their link to data from the FBI’s own Crime Data Explorer. I ran a report using their graph and was shocked to learn something. It’s true. The crime rate in Illinois is plummeting…or at least it did with the most recent data from 2021 to 2022.
Hey, dumbass, let me share a little secret with you. From the Marshall Project:
What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell
The transition to a new data system creates huge gaps in national crime stats sure to be exploited by politicians in this election year.
Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program, leaving a massive gap in information sure to be exploited by politicians in midterm election campaigns already dominated by public fear over a rise in violent crime.
In 2021, the FBI retired its nearly century-old national crime data collection program, the Summary Reporting System used by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. The agency switched to a new system, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which gathers more specific information on each incident. Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year.
Emphasis added.
You can make your city’s crime numbers look really good to the FBI by not sending them.
And MOST AGENCIES in Illinois didn’t send them.
Suddenly, almost by magic, Gov. Pritzker’s Land of Lincoln crime numbers make it look as though under JB’s leadership, we don’t have nearly as much major crime anymore.
The fact that a majority of departments suddenly decided to stop sending the data to the FBI suggest to me that there’s someone urging them to stop doing what they’ve done for a long, long time.
Lastly, someone else once told me to never trust any adult who hasn’t shot a gun. That advice has proven prescient once again as well.
Pure logic: if crimes are not “reported”, there is no/less crime as opposed to when crime is reported. Duuuhhh!
Maybe this “journalist” is the same one that writes the newspaper you see at grocery checkouts, the one that reports Elvis is alive on a space ship, The British Royal family are lizard people, Etc. Also, Illinois has more than one small town propaganda radio station. Maybe Pigster tossed a bribe to this guy ( like certain judges ) to polish the turd.
Gasbags gaslighting us indeed. Doc is a dumbass. He should stick to selling advertising.
A headline JB Pritzker’s campaign will no doubt trumpet in his race for the all-you-can-eat buffet. Oh, I mean President.